These words will be familiar to all students of Skelt’s Juvenile Drama.
That national monument, after having changed its name to Park’s, to
Webb’s, to Redington’s, and last of all to Pollock’s, has now become, for
the most part, a memory. Some of its pillars, like Stonehenge, are still
afoot, the rest clean vanished. It may be the Museum numbers a full set;
and Mr. Ionides perhaps, or else her gracious Majesty, may boast their
great collections; but to the plain private person they are become, like
Raphaels, unattainable. I have, at different times, possessed _Aladdin_,
_The Red Rover_, _The Blind Boy_, _The Old Oak Chest_, _The Wood Dæmon_,
_Jack Sheppard_, _The Miller and his Men_, _Der Freischütz_, _The
Smuggler_, _The Forest of Bondy_, _Robin Hood_, _The Waterman_, _Richard
I._, _My Poll and my Partner Joe_, _The Inchcape Bell_ (imperfect), and
_Three-Fingered Jack_, _The Terror of Jamaica_; and I have assisted
others in the illumination of _Maid of the Inn_ and _The Battle of
Waterloo_. In this roll-call of stirring names you read the evidences of
a happy childhood; and though not half of them are still to be procured
of any living stationer, in the mind of their once happy owner all
survive, kaleidoscopes of changing pictures, echoes of the past.
There stands, I fancy, to this day (but now how fallen!) a certain
stationer’s shop at a corner of the wide thoroughfare that joins the city
of my childhood with the sea. When, upon any Saturday, we made a party
to behold the ships, we passed that corner; and since in those days I
loved a ship as a man loves Burgundy or daybreak, this of itself had been
enough to hallow it. But there was more than that. In the Leith Walk
window, all the year round, there stood displayed a theatre in working
order, with a “forest set,” a “combat,” and a few “robbers carousing” in
the slides; and below and about, dearer tenfold to me! the plays
themselves, those budgets of romance, lay tumbled one upon another. Long
and often have I lingered there with empty pockets. One figure, we shall
say, was visible in the first plate of characters, bearded, pistol in
hand, or drawing to his ear the clothyard arrow; I would spell the name:
was it Macaire, or Long Tom Coffin, or Grindoff, 2d dress? O, how I
would long to see the rest! how—if the name by chance were hidden—I would
wonder in what play he figured, and what immortal legend justified his
attitude and strange apparel! And then to go within, to announce
yourself as an intending purchaser, and, closely watched, be suffered to
undo those bundles and breathlessly devour those pages of gesticulating
villains, epileptic combats, bosky forests, palaces and war-ships,
frowning fortresses and prison vaults—it was a giddy joy. That shop,
which was dark and smelt of Bibles, was a loadstone rock for all that
bore the name of boy. They could not pass it by, nor, having entered,
leave it. It was a place besieged; the shopmen, like the Jews rebuilding
Salem, had a double task. They kept us at the stick’s end, frowned us
down, snatched each play out of our hand ere we were trusted with
another, and, increditable as it may sound, used to demand of us upon our
entrance, like banditti, if we came with money or with empty hand. Old
Mr. Smith himself, worn out with my eternal vacillation, once swept the
treasures from before me, with the cry: “I do not believe, child, that
you are an intending purchaser at all!” These were the dragons of the
garden; but for such joys of paradise we could have faced the Terror of
Jamaica himself. Every sheet we fingered was another lightning glance
into obscure, delicious story; it was like wallowing in the raw stuff of
story-books. I know nothing to compare with it save now and then in
dreams, when I am privileged to read in certain unwrit stories of
adventure, from which I awake to find the world all vanity. The _crux_
of Buridan’s donkey was as nothing to the uncertainty of the boy as he
handled and lingered and doated on these bundles of delight; there was a
physical pleasure in the sight and touch of them which he would jealously
prolong; and when at length the deed was done, the play selected, and the
impatient shopman had brushed the rest into the gray portfolio, and the
boy was forth again, a little late for dinner, the lamps springing into
light in the blue winter’s even, and _The Miller_, or _The Rover_, or
some kindred drama clutched against his side—on what gay feet he ran, and
how he laughed aloud in exultation! I can hear that laughter still. Out
of all the years of my life, I can recall but one home-coming to compare
with these, and that was on the night when I brought back with me the
_Arabian Entertainments_ in the fat, old, double-columned volume with the
prints. I was just well into the story of the Hunchback, I remember,
when my clergyman-grandfather (a man we counted pretty stiff) came in
behind me. I grew blind with terror. But instead of ordering the book
away, he said he envied me. Ah, well he might!
The purchase and the first half-hour at home, that was the summit.
Thenceforth the interest declined by little and little. The fable, as
set forth in the play-book, proved to be not worthy of the scenes and
characters: what fable would not? Such passages as: “Scene 6. The
Hermitage. Night set scene. Place back of scene 1, No. 2, at back of
stage and hermitage, Fig. 2, out of set piece, R. H. in a slanting
direction”—such passages, I say, though very practical, are hardly to be
called good reading. Indeed, as literature, these dramas did not much
appeal to me. I forget the very outline of the plots. Of _The Blind
Boy_, beyond the fact that he was a most injured prince and once, I
think, abducted, I know nothing. And _The Old Oak Chest_, what was it
all about? that proscript (1st dress), that prodigious number of
banditti, that old woman with the broom, and the magnificent kitchen in
the third act (was it in the third?)—they are all fallen in a deliquium,
swim faintly in my brain, and mix and vanish.
I cannot deny that joy attended the illumination; nor can I quite forget
that child who, wilfully foregoing pleasure, stoops to “twopence
coloured.” With crimson lake (hark to the sound of it—crimson lake!—the
horns of elf-land are not richer on the ear)—with crimson lake and
Prussian blue a certain purple is to be compounded which, for cloaks
especially, Titian could not equal. The latter colour with gamboge, a
hated name although an exquisite pigment, supplied a green of such a
savoury greenness that to-day my heart regrets it. Nor can I recall
without a tender weakness the very aspect of the water where I dipped my
brush. Yes, there was pleasure in the painting. But when all was
painted, it is needless to deny it, all was spoiled. You might, indeed,
set up a scene or two to look at; but to cut the figures out was simply
sacrilege; nor could any child twice court the tedium, the worry, and the
long-drawn disenchantment of an actual performance. Two days after the
purchase the honey had been sucked. Parents used to complain; they
thought I wearied of my play. It was not so: no more than a person can
be said to have wearied of his dinner when he leaves the bones and
dishes; I had got the marrow of it and said grace.
Then was the time to turn to the back of the play-book and to study that
enticing double file of names, where poetry, for the true child of Skelt,
reigned happy and glorious like her Majesty the Queen. Much as I have
travelled in these realms of gold, I have yet seen, upon that map or
abstract, names of El Dorados that still haunt the ear of memory, and are
still but names. _The Floating Beacon_—why was that denied me? or _The
Wreck Ashore_? _Sixteen-String Jack_ whom I did not even guess to be a
highwayman, troubled me awake and haunted my slumbers; and there is one
sequence of three from that enchanted calender that I still at times
recall, like a loved verse of poetry: _Lodoiska_, _Silver Palace_, _Echo
of Westminster Bridge_. Names, bare names, are surely more to children
than we poor, grown-up, obliterated fools remember.
The name of Skelt itself has always seemed a part and parcel of the charm
of his productions. It may be different with the rose, but the
attraction of this paper drama sensibly declined when Webb had crept into
the rubric: a poor cuckoo, flaunting in Skelt’s nest. And now we have
reached Pollock, sounding deeper gulfs. Indeed, this name of Skelt
appears so stagey and piratic, that I will adopt it boldly to design
these qualities. Skeltery, then, is a quality of much art. It is even
to be found, with reverence be it said, among the works of nature. The
stagey is its generic name; but it is an old, insular, home-bred
staginess; not French, domestically British; not of to-day, but smacking
of O. Smith, Fitzball, and the great age of melodrama: a peculiar
fragrance haunting it; uttering its unimportant message in a tone of
voice that has the charm of fresh antiquity. I will not insist upon the
art of Skelt’s purveyors. These wonderful characters that once so
thrilled our soul with their bold attitude, array of deadly engines and
incomparable costume, to-day look somewhat pallidly; the extreme hard
favour of the heroine strikes me, I had almost said with pain; the
villain’s scowl no longer thrills me like a trumpet; and the scenes
themselves, those once unparalleled landscapes, seem the efforts of a
prentice hand. So much of fault we find; but on the other side the
impartial critic rejoices to remark the presence of a great unity of
gusto; of those direct clap-trap appeals, which a man is dead and
buriable when he fails to answer; of the footlight glamour, the
ready-made, bare-faced, transpontine picturesque, a thing not one with
cold reality, but how much dearer to the mind!
The scenery of Skeltdom—or, shall we say, the kingdom of Transpontus?—had
a prevailing character. Whether it set forth Poland as in _The Blind
Boy_, or Bohemia with _The Miller and his Men_, or Italy with _The Old
Oak Chest_, still it was Transpontus. A botanist could tell it by the
plants. The hollyhock was all pervasive, running wild in deserts; the
dock was common, and the bending reed; and overshadowing these were
poplar, palm, potato tree, and _Quercus Skeltica_—brave growths. The
caves were all embowelled in the Surreyside formation; the soil was all
betrodden by the light pump of T. P. Cooke. Skelt, to be sure, had yet
another, an oriental string: he held the gorgeous east in fee; and in the
new quarter of Hyères, say, in the garden of the Hotel des Iles d’Or, you
may behold these blessed visions realised. But on these I will not
dwell; they were an outwork; it was in the occidental scenery that Skelt
was all himself. It had a strong flavour of England; it was a sort of
indigestion of England and drop-scenes, and I am bound to say was
charming. How the roads wander, how the castle sits upon the hill, how
the sun eradiates from behind the cloud, and how the congregated clouds
themselves up-roll, as stiff as bolsters! Here is the cottage interior,
the usual first flat, with the cloak upon the nail, the rosaries of
onions, the gun and powder-horn and corner-cupboard; here is the inn
(this drama must be nautical, I foresee Captain Luff and Bold Bob
Bowsprit) with the red curtain, pipes, spittoons, and eight-day clock;
and there again is that impressive dungeon with the chains, which was so
dull to colour. England, the hedgerow elms, the thin brick houses,
windmills, glimpses of the navigable Thames—England, when at last I came
to visit it, was only Skelt made evident: to cross the border was, for
the Scotsman, to come home to Skelt; there was the inn-sign and there the
horse-trough, all foreshadowed in the faithful Skelt. If, at the ripe
age of fourteen years, I bought a certain cudgel, got a friend to load
it, and thenceforward walked the tame ways of the earth my own ideal,
radiating pure romance—still I was but a puppet in the hand of Skelt; the
original of that regretted bludgeon, and surely the antitype of all the
bludgeon kind, greatly improved from Cruikshank, had adorned the hand of
Jonathan Wild, pl. I. “This is mastering me,” as Whitman cries, upon
some lesser provocation. What am I? what are life, art, letters, the
world, but what my Skelt has made them? He stamped himself upon my
immaturity. The world was plain before I knew him, a poor penny world;
but soon it was all coloured with romance. If I go to the theatre to see
a good old melodrama, ’tis but Skelt a little faded. If I visit a bold
scene in nature, Skelt would have been bolder; there had been certainly a
castle on that mountain, and the hollow tree—that set piece—I seem to
miss it in the foreground. Indeed, out of this cut-and-dry, dull,
swaggering, obtrusive, and infantile art, I seem to have learned the very
spirit of my life’s enjoyment; met there the shadows of the characters I
was to read about and love in a late future; got the romance of _Der
Freischütz_ long ere I was to hear of Weber or the mighty Formes;
acquired a gallery of scenes and characters with which, in the silent
theatre of the brain, I might enact all novels and romances; and took
from these rude cuts an enduring and transforming pleasure. Reader—and
yourself?
A word of moral: it appears that B. Pollock, late J. Redington, No. 73
Hoxton Street, not only publishes twenty-three of these old stage
favourites, but owns the necessary plates and displays a modest readiness
to issue other thirty-three. If you love art, folly, or the bright eyes
of children, speed to Pollock’s, or to Clarke’s of Garrick Street. In
Pollock’s list of publicanda I perceive a pair of my ancient aspirations:
_Wreck Ashore_ and _Sixteen-String Jack_; and I cherish the belief that
when these shall see once more the light of day, B. Pollock will remember
this apologist. But, indeed, I have a dream at times that is not all a
dream. I seem to myself to wander in a ghostly street—E. W., I think,
the postal district—close below the fool’s-cap of St. Paul’s, and yet
within easy hearing of the echo of the Abbey bridge. There in a dim
shop, low in the roof and smelling strong of glue and footlights, I find
myself in quaking treaty with great Skelt himself, the aboriginal all
dusty from the tomb. I buy, with what a choking heart—I buy them all,
all but the pantomimes; I pay my mental money, and go forth; and lo! the
packets are dust.